A DAY IN THE COUNTRY

"Physics and everything we know in the world around us may really be tied to processes whose fundamental existence is not here around us, but rather exists in some distant bounding surface like some thin hologram, which by virtue of illuminating it in the right way can reproduce what looks like a 3-dimensional world. Perhaps our three dimensional world is really just a holographic illumination of laws that exist on some thin bounding slice, like that thin little piece of plastic, that thin hologram. It's an amazing idea, and I think is likely to be where physics goes in the next few years or in the next decade, at least when one's talking about quantum gravity or quantum string theory."

BRIAN GREENE, professor of physics and of mathematics, at Columbia University is widely regarded for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory. He is the author of The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for an Ultimate Theory.